Veteran Russian opposition leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky has criticised the artificial creations of states as a means of provoking geopolitical conflict. In a statement before the Russian State Duma, Zhirinovsky said the following,

“Soon we will celebrate 70 years since the establishment of the State of Israel. Why was it created in the Middle East? It would be wiser to create this state in the territories of Germany, which were transferred to Poland after the war – Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia. This would be a reproach to the Germans: you staged the Holocaust, and now part of Germany passes to Israel. But the goal was not to create favorable conditions for the life of Jews in Europe, but to continue to provoke wars in the Middle East. There is oil and gas, there are all the people who historically were at war with each other. They needed a fuse, and now it is lit

Ukraine is the same, but on the border with Russia. The sole purpose of the existence of this artificial country is to create problems for us.

In 1997, I called for the renunciation of the Treaty of Friendship with Ukraine. The Communists nevertheless persuaded the State Duma to do this, because they still believe in internationalism. As a result, we ourselves recognized all its borders, calling Ukraine independent, although never in the history of such a state, and even more so in such limits did not exist”.

Indeed, as far back as 1997 when Moscow and Kiev signed a now infamous Friendship Treaty, otherwise known as the Kharkov Agreement, the LDPR stood alone as a major Russian party opposed to the agreement as Zhirinovsky foresaw the crumbling of a Ukrainian entity fabricated without a clear historical basis nor democratic mandate. To understand the history of the regions which now comprise Ukraine, one must go back at least to the 17th century in order to grasp that the state now known as Ukraine was never anything but a set of territories which shifted between Russia, Poland and Ottoman Turkey.

In 1667, the Treaty of Andrusovo affirmed Russian sovereignty over historic Russian lands that had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the 14th century. These areas were de-facto Russian ever since the Treaty of Pereyaslav, signed in 1654 as an alliance between local Cossacks and the government in Moscow.The restoration of lands which were previously Russian dating back to the founding of the first Russian state in the 9th century, was affirmed in the 1686 Treaty of Perpetual Peace.

These regions became known as Malorossiya (Little Russian) and formed the triumvirate of the Three Russias under a single sovereign (Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia). The lands of Malorossiya on the left-bank of the river Dnieper were later incorporated into further territorial gains from Poland-Lithuania on the right-bank of the river Dnieper in 1793.

In the 1764, former Ottoman regions around the Black Sea including the cities of Odessa and Donetsk formed Novorossiya or New Russia. The former Ottoman Khanate of Crimea formally linked up with this region in 1783.

The current borders of Ukraine were manufactured haphazardly under Bolshevik rule which effectively slammed together the historic regions of Novorossiya and Malorossiya with western regions bordering former Polish lands that had been subsumed by Austro-Hungarian rule in the late-modern period. Areas that were part of the Second Polish Republic between the world wars, including Galicia and the Czech and Hungarian regions of Carpathian Ruthenia, were incorporated into The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after 1945.

This odd mix of historic regions with different identities is the primary reasons that a conflict in the modern borders of Ukraine were simply a matter of “when” rather than “if”.

The story of “Israel” is even more infamous. A land which prior to the middle of the 20th century was home to an Arab population along with groups ethnic minorities was a place where Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Christians, a minority of Shi’a Muslims, Armenian Christians, Sephardi Jews and Roman Catholics coexisted in peace. Then in the years after the British government authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917, waves of European Jews arrived in the former Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Kudüs (al-Quds), something which culminated in the Nakba of 1948 and the present regional crisis. As Zhirinovsky stated, it would have been far more sensible to give the victims of the Holocaust land taken not from the Palestinians who had nothing to do with European persecution of Jews, but from the perpetrators of the Holocaust – Germany.

If history is a guide, such geopolitical entities eventually collapse under their own fabricated weight. The only hope is that such a collapse can be democratic and peaceful rather than violent and tumultuous. The clear solution for Ukraine are multiple regional referenda where each constituent part of the crumbling artificial state will be able to vote on where they feel their political future lies whether with Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary or a small EU member state in Galicia. The fact that such refrenda were not conducted as early as the mid 1990s is demonstrable of the calculated intention of the enemies of peace to prop up a compositionally and pragmatically failed state in order to provoke regional problems, particularly in respect of Russia.

For Palestine, the solution is even clearer. There must be a post-Apartheid South Africa style one state settlement where the full civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of the region are guaranteed by a non-sectarian/pro-equality constitution, while the Palestinian families expelled from their lands in the 20th century must have an automatic right of return.

Sadly, the present reality is that Palestine remains occupied by the “Israeli” regime while the people of Donbass who have already exercised their self-determination in a democratic vote are subject to continuous aggressive war by the fascist regime in Kiev.